by M. H. Baylis
* * *
‘Ok. Lock and load,’ said Susan, who hailed from New York, and liked the odd Hollywood phrase. Rex turned to his screen and made the web article live. The phone almost immediately started ringing in the editor’s office.
‘That was quick,’ said Susan, heading off to answer it. ‘Did we spell the girl’s name wrong?’
On his way back from the water-cooler, Lawrence peered at Rex’s screen. ‘Hmmm,’ he said, at length.
Rex stopped himself from saying something rude. ‘What, Lawrence?’
‘Just thinking it’s a bit rum, that’s all.’ He returned to his seat, waiting to be asked more.
Rex obliged, testily. ‘What is?’
‘I’m not intimately acquainted with the mind-set of the teenage self-immolator, but I’d have thought someone making a gesture like that would have chosen more carefully.’
‘What’s wrong with a shopping centre while a politician’s doing a walkabout?’
‘Quite a few things,’ Lawrence said. ‘Point the first being that she wasn’t in a shopping centre, was she? Not the centre of the centre, anyway.’
‘What?’
‘The main event – the walkabout – had already happened over the road, hadn’t it? Where the proper shops are. Q and A sitting in that little fake garden bit in the grand hay-trium. Big crowds.’ Lawrence removed his glasses, jabbing the ear-ends towards Rex to underscore his point. ‘If you were going to disrupt proceedings with an act of petroleum-based self-annihilation, you’d do it there, wouldn’t you? Not at the arse-end of the tour over the road, when there’s no one to watch except three alkies and a pit-bull.’
Rex was silent. Lawrence had a point. Although Shopping City’s planners had doubtless never intended it that way, the place, these days, had partitioned itself, like some troubled country, into two distinct halves. In the west, a smart section, where high-end cargo like TVs, laptops and weddings rings was sold, alongside a cinema, coffee chains and a seating area around a water feature. The eastern chunk had become an emptier place, where rents were cheaper, businesses failed more quickly and the customers wore a harder, grimmer look.
‘Maybe she meant to do it in the posh bit but she couldn’t get there in time. Or there were more people in the posh end, so that meant more likelihood of being spotted and stopped.’
‘It’s about maximum impact, though, isn’t it? No one sets light to themselves in their bedrooms. Not unless they’ve got their eighty-two thousand Twitbook followers watching on webcam. She’d have been thinking about where to do it for the best exposure. And if she was thinking that…’
‘You’re assuming reason. How rational is anyone prepared to set light to themselves?’
‘Those Youth Tube videos and blogs seem pretty rational to me,’ said Lawrence, signalling an end to the conversation with a fresh burst of typing.
Rex stared back at his screen. Annoying as Lawrence was, with his perma-tan and his golfing jumpers, he often made sense. Rex just didn’t want, in this instance, to allow it in. Somehow, tragic and stupid and ghastly as it was, there was a way of processing Mina’s suicidal protest – a label under which it could be filed and to some extent, held away. But if it was something else, he had to keep thinking about it, keep remembering the colours of the flames, the scream and the white face and that awful, mortal smell alongside the chatty little girl and the reserved teenager and the books and all the bright promise.
As a distraction, he wrote up his interview with Dr Georgiou. It was a piece that would garner a lot of local interest, perhaps do well beyond the borough too. It needed a picture, though, and he hadn’t taken one. When he went onto the website of Dr Georgiou’s particular UN department, the unhappily-titled UNWCAGRC, she was listed on a dozen or so documents, but there was no profile photo. He realised he’d need Terry to take a snap of her. He also realised he didn’t want Terry to do that.
Susan emerged from her inner sanctum with an urgent look. ‘Are you available for our…’ she said, or rather mouthed the words in such a conspiratorial manner that everyone in the office made a note to gossip about it later.
The plan had changed, as plans often did with the editor. Instead of going for coffee, they now had to drive in Susan’s car – a perky Mini smelling of leather and cherries – to an MOT Test Centre just off Philip Lane. She drove like the locals, many of whom had acquired their road-skills in Istanbul or Abuja: competitive, with liberal use of horn and hand gesture. He’d known Susan for a long time, worked with her, in another lifetime, on the nationals, and she’d always driven Minis which exuded the same, almost gentlemanly smell. But he couldn’t remember whether she’d always driven that way. Back then he’d driven his own cars.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked, staring ahead as they let a formation of hijab-clad Somalis flap over the zebra crossing. ‘The girl, I mean. I should probably send you and Terry for trauma counselling, but, well… I’m not going to be around to argue with you. I take it you’d rather spend the weekend drinking whisky in the dark, or something.’
‘I hate whisky,’ Rex said. ‘But you’re right. I don’t fancy lying on a couch and talking about it for a hundred quid an hour. Why aren’t you going to be around?’
‘Oh get an eye-test, fucko!’ Susan roared, as a scaffolder’s lorry executed some illegal move and caused her to slam the brakes on. A tattooed arm returned the compliment.
‘Have you noticed all the building work?’
‘Sure,’ Susan said. ‘Big question is, what’s behind it? Easy loans, better times or the council that likes to say Yes?’
‘Why would the council be doing that?’
‘Because Eric is a shrewd operator.’
‘I thought you were an admirer.’
‘I am. Just look out of your window – the streets are clean for the first time in years. He got that TV chef from Highgate to make a broighes about the school dinners budget, and now our kids are eating organic. Ours is the only local authority in the UK to have opened libraries since 2010. Eric’s only been in two years, and he’s done great things. But he knows he’s got to stay at the top to do them. Same in Montreal when I was there,’ she said, executing the sort of three-point turn that wouldn’t have disgraced a heist movie. Rex wondered when Susan had been in Montreal. ‘Government says build more homes. So the Mayor has to build more homes. Only way to get that through is relax the zoning, let every Jack do what Jill wants. Five years on, place is groaning. Schools, hospitals, roads, buses, fucked. Full up. But all the people who pay taxes are happy, because now they’ve got their sauna rooms and their twenty-foot bird houses at the back. Eric knows what he’s doing.’
She meant Eric Miles, head of Harringay and Tottenham’s first, Independent-run council. He was the man who’d okayed the zoo project on the marshes – a move that had rather smudged the gleam on his popularity – but he was still more popular than any politician in recent memory.
‘I wish Eric had had a word with the bloke who came to look at my house.’
Rex told Susan about the catch-22 situation surrounding his windows, and the even weirder response of Ashley Pocock, the young planning officer. Susan laughed.
‘You’ve been a hack for, what, 23 years? You’ve lived here for nearly half of them, And you don’t know what he meant?’
‘No.’
‘You couldn’t pick up some clues from, for example, the German whip with the monogram plates?’
He was about to laugh at her use of the street vernacular for a BMW, but it died in his throat as he realised what she meant. What Ashley Pocock had meant.
‘He was after a bung? No! He –’
‘He what?’
‘He didn’t look the type,’ Rex said lamely. Susan laughed.
‘OK. Already I didn’t like all this nesting you’re doing. Now I think maybe you’d be better off on the Methodist Times,’ Susan said, as she pulled in at the test centre. A neckless, Balkan-looking man in greasy blues approached. ‘Talking
of which. Please don’t go to the Methodist Times in the next few months. The paper’s going to need you. I’ve got to go to the States.’
‘For a few months?’
‘Maybe longer. The official reason is my health, but it’s not actually my health, it’s someone else’s. I will be back, but I don’t know when.’
He nodded. Susan’s inner world was a mystery, closely guarded, and although he joined his colleagues in speculating about it, he respected the distance.
‘So you want me to be the boss?’
She leant her head back so that the bun of her dark, silvering hair touched the stitched headrest. ‘Actually no. I mean – what I want doesn’t come into it. Our publishing partners are sending someone else to keep a hand on the tiller. It’s non-negotiable, and obviously no reflection on your abilities.’
‘Funny you felt the need to say that, then.’
She frowned. ‘Don’t be a child about it, Rex. Look on the positive. Someone else will be taking the crap. Not you. How do you think you could helm up the paper and write it and get Sybille settled in France at the same time?’
Anger flashed through him. ‘That’s cheap, Susan, throwing her in.’
‘What’s cheap is you, making out this is your problem. If you considered me for a minute, you’d realise you are not the unlucky victim here.’ Susan slid, with expert dignity, out of the car, handing the keys to the mechanic.
Rex stayed in the passenger seat for a second, jangled and awkward. It had been like a lovers’ tiff, an exact replica, in fact, of the charges his wife used to lay at his door. That he was self-centred, made every problem about himself. He hated being reminded of it. And he hated how much his boss knew. But he wouldn’t be here if she didn’t. He’d be in a very bad place. And Susan Auerbach, and the trailblazing little local paper she ran and this teeming, ugly, lovely borough had rescued him. He couldn’t forget that.
He got out of the car. ‘Sorry,’ he said, making a pacifying gesture. ‘Sorry. It’s a shock, and I don’t want you to go. Who are they sending?’
‘I don’t want to go either. You’ll find out who’s coming on Monday morning.’
‘That soon? Aren’t you doing a handover?’
‘No need.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll be on a plane to JFK Sunday pm,’ she said, not answering his question. ‘Hence the last minute sorting-out of everything.’ Her phone started to ring. She looked at it. ‘I gotta take this. I’ll see you back in the office.’
As dusk fell and the air turned cold, he trudged back past the grocers and tea-houses of Philip Lane, his foot beginning to throb, sweat on his brow chilling, a familiar thirst gathering in his throat as he went by the hand-written ‘7 cans for 5’ beer ads in the shop windows.
Rex Tracey was not, by anyone’s yardstick, a calm man. He ran on a fairly high throttle, ideas and notions and irrational summaries occurring to him constantly, needing to be acted upon, which he did, in the same, clumsy, charging fashion, like a bull in need of an eye-test. What with all that, and the painkillers he swallowed to ease the pain in his foot, and the other painkillers he swallowed to deal with the withdrawals from the first lot, he ended each day feeling as if he’d run a marathon. Feeling this way, he also felt entitled to sink a great deal of Polish lager, and more painkillers. He was a very fit man, in other words. He had to be, to survive himself.
And he might have been green when it came to opportunist planning officials, but his instincts were sharp where office politics were concerned. He was sure Susan hadn’t been telling the truth. He doubted their parent paper had any sort of ‘policy’ when it came to caretaker editors; they were far too chaotic. Someone just didn’t think he was up to the job. That someone seemed to be Susan herself. And why had she said there was no need for a handover?
For a year now, Rex’s newspaper and website had borne the unpalatable title of s: Haringey. Everyone hated it, but everyone knew it was better than no paper at all, which was what had nearly happened until the hefty, lefty national The Sentinel bought a controlling share, as it had done with dozens of sickly local titles around the southeast.
s: Haringey now shared stories with its mother ship, and on a Friday, alongside the local stuff, extolled in colour print the delights to be found in The Sentinel’s weekend editions. For the most part, the job was the same. Most people, staff included, referred to both paper and website as the Wood Green Gazette, which it hadn’t been for some years. Then again, most people still thought they lived in Haringey, a borough which, officially and constitutionally, had become either Harringay and Tottenham or Enfield-Haringey, depending on where you lived. So the new paper was either in step, or out of it. And whatever it was, people from its Head Office rarely made their presence felt. Which was exactly why Rex didn’t believe this was their decision.
He crossed Philip Lane and headed south down Lawrence Road, a strange, near-barren landscape of dilapidated office blocks and textile manufacturers. Once, long before his arrival in the area, this place had been thriving, a hub for the garment trade now lost to China. The units still bore the names of their mostly Turkish and Cypriot founders, Kyprianou Brothers, Toprak and Co., Greeks and Turks now united in industrial despair. A few were still going: a military-looking hangar that made rubberised bedding, another low unit entitled Tents, Weatherproofs, Bags.
Toprak & Co., Textiles had been in operation, too, until a fire ripped through the place a couple of months back: there were hints that the insurance company was refusing to pay out, darker rumours of some long-running feud with Spyridonidis Sons next door. Now it was shrouded, save for one upper window, in sheets of ply. A light burnt in the window, though, and Rex had a picture of the boss, old man Toprak, sitting at some charred desk with his bald head in his huge, circus-strongman hands, hoping for an answer. Or calling his son, Bilal, who now had a top job on Eric Miles’ council.
A siren wailed over on Green Lanes and he realised he could no longer tell the difference between ambulance, fire and police. At one point, he was sure, they’d all had their own sounds. Now, there was just a general clamour of trouble. That was how his life felt, too. Girls setting themselves on fire. Bosses lying. Officials after bribes. And his wife, about to leave or, more accurately, to be shipped three hundred miles away. Unless he could stop it.
A battery of fireworks in the still-light sky – Newroz celebrants, he guessed, too giddy to wait for dark. He wondered if they’d seen the news, or how much it mattered to all the people who would later be driving their cars slowly down Green Lanes with flags flying and horns blaring.
Everybody knew about the Kurds elsewhere, of course, the thousands pouring from the madness of Syria and Iraq into squalid camps, if they were lucky. The local Kurds, most of whom had come from Southern Turkey in the 1980s, raised money for their brethren, collected old clothes and canned food, marched and waved flags to advertise their plight. That image, of a woman shaking a tin for far-off relations, had at least replaced the older one, of the Bombacılar. The ‘Bombers’ were powerful Kurdish heroin gangs, who’d been shipping their powders through the back of the fruit and veg halls on Green Lanes since the early 1980s, occasionally conducting takeovers with cutlasses and guns. In between the tin-shakers and the gangsters, though, were a good few thousand other London Kurds, unnoticed, unrecognised, usually mistaken for Turks.
Had Mina Küçüktürk come from a line of agitators and protestors? Her father, with his lurid paintwork and his mysterious posters, perhaps had a touch of defiance about him. Principally, though, the old man in the ever-present grey jumper complained about the thugs around the bus station and the constant digging-up of the Lanes, the same issues plaguing most locals, whatever global fault-line they hailed from. But Mina? The little girl interested in badgers had turned, he remembered, into something of a green activist. She’d got her father into recycling, long before the council had made it mandatory. He was also fairly certain that she’d given up meat in her early teenage years
. But lots of girls were like that, because they loved animals, or they wanted some cover story for losing weight. It was hardly a sign of imminent self-immolation.
There were other girls who’d set themselves on fire. At the office he’d followed Mina’s links to the last two. Both refugees from Iraq, with lost family members and personal experience of being bombed and gassed and stateless. Their extreme protests were chapters, painful, undeserved end-chapters, of their already-extreme lives. He doubted they’d ever sat doing school projects about badgers, or braided their hair or been bored by their GCSE set texts. That was what made Mina’s actions stand out, what made them so odd and upsetting. That, and the site of them, as Lawrence had pointed out – the quietest, least noticeable time and place for something that surely depended for its meaning on an audience.
He felt sick again and he sat down at a bus stop. He practised the eye and finger trick the doctor had taught him earlier on and immersed himself in the memories he wanted to forget. Most were fainter now. Except the white streak. The streak was now a face again – a skinny, pale, man’s face, peering over the balcony. Irritated, he tried again and gradually felt some calm, or at least control, returning. Horns tooted somewhere. Life went on. There was a smell of blossom as the birds tweeted a bedtime song and the skies purpled.
He’d liked Dr Georgiadis, liked her dark, lively eyes and the frequency with which she smiled and laughed. That curious way of holding her head, high and slightly tilted back, a Queen at a Coronation, or a ballet dancer on stage. He hoped he’d see more of her.